Lyndon LaRouche

Early life

LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the oldest of three children of Jessie Lenore (née Weir) and Lyndon H. LaRouche Sr. His paternal grandfather's family emigrated to the United States from Rimouski, Quebec, whereas his maternal grandfather was born in Scotland. His father worked for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Rochester before the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts.

His parents became Quakers after his father converted from Catholicism. They forbade him from fighting with other children, even in self-defense, which he said led to "years of hell" from bullies at school. As a result, he spent much of his time alone, taking long walks through the woods and identifying in his mind with great philosophers. He wrote that, between the ages of 12 and 14, he read philosophy extensively, embracing the ideas of Leibniz and rejecting those of Hume, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, and Kant. He graduated from Lynn English High School in 1940. In the same year, the Lynn Quakers expelled his father from the group, for reportedly accusing other Quakers of misusing funds, while writing under the pen name Hezekiah Micajah Jones. LaRouche and his mother resigned in sympathy with his father.

University studies, Marxism, marriage

LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942. He later wrote that his teachers "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate". As a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector during World War II and joined a Civilian Public Service camp in lieu of military service. In 1944, he decided to enlist in the United States Army and served with the Medical Corps in India and Burma during the Burma campaign. At the end of the war, he was working as a clerk in the Ordnance Corps, and later described his decision to enlist as the most important decision of his life. In his 1988 autobiography, LaRouche said that being asked to express his views on the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a group of fellow G.I.s led him to define his "principal lifelong political commitment, that the United States should take postwar world leadership in establishing a world order dedicated to promoting the economic development of what we call today "developing nations".

LaRouche wrote that, while in the conscientious objector camp, he discussed Marxism, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Donald Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism. Back in the U.S., he resumed his education at Northeastern University but dropped out. He returned to Lynn in 1948 and the next year joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to recruit at the GE River Works there, adopting the name "Lyn Marcus" for his political work. He arrived in New York City in 1953, where he worked as a management consultant. In 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a member of the SWP. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.

Career

1960s

By 1961, the LaRouches were living on Central Park West in Manhattan, and LaRouche's activities at that time were mostly focused on his career and not on the SWP. He and his wife separated in 1963, and he moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with another SWP member, Carol Schnitzer, also known as Larrabee. In 1964 he began an association with an SWP faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, a faction later expelled from the SWP, and came under the influence of British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy.

For six months, LaRouche worked with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, who later wrote that LaRouche had a "gargantuan ego" and "a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth." Leaving Wohlforth's group, LaRouche briefly joined the rival Spartacist League before announcing his intention to build a new Fifth International.

In 1967, LaRouche began teaching classes on Marx's dialectical materialism at New York City's Free School, and attracted a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, recommending that they read Das Kapital, as well as Hegel, Kant, and Leibniz. During the 1968 Columbia University protests, he organized his supporters under the name National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). The aim of the NCLC was to win control of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) branch – the university's main activist group – and build a political alliance between students, local residents, organized labor, and the Columbia faculty. By 1973, the NCLC had over 600 members in 25 cities – including West Berlin and Stockholm – and produced what LaRouche's biographer, Dennis King, called the most literate of the far-left papers, New Solidarity. The NCLC's internal activities became highly regimented over the next few years. Members gave up their jobs and devoted themselves to the group and its leader, believing it would soon take control of America's trade unions and overthrow the government.

1970s

Robert J. Alexander writes that LaRouche first established an NCLC "intelligence network" in 1971. Members all over the world sent information to NCLC headquarters, which would distribute the information via briefings and other publications. LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which critics say was done to gain access to government officials under press cover. The publications included Executive Intelligence Review, founded in 1974. Other periodicals under his aegis included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, and Campaigner Magazine. His news services and publishers included American System Publications, Campaigner Publications, New Solidarity International Press Service, and The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company. LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security. In 1982, U.S. News & World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that members were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.

U.S. sources told The Washington Post in 1985 that the LaRouche organization had assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and that his researchers sometimes supplied information to government officials. Bobby Ray Inman, the CIA's deputy director in 1981 and 1982, said LaRouche and his wife had visited him, offering information about the West German Green Party. A CIA spokesman said LaRouche met Deputy Director John McMahon in 1983 to discuss one of LaRouche's trips overseas. An aide to Deputy Secretary of State William Clark said when LaRouche's associates discussed technology or economics, they made good sense and seemed qualified. Norman Bailey, formerly with the U.S. National Security Council, said in 1984 that LaRouche's staff comprised "one of the best private intelligence services in the world. ... They do know a lot of people around the world. They do get to talk to prime ministers and presidents." Several government officials feared a security leak from the government's ties with the movement. According to critics, the supposed behind-the-scenes processes were more often flights of fancy than inside information. Douglas Foster wrote in Mother Jones in 1982 that the briefings consisted of disinformation, "hate-filled" material about enemies, phony letters, intimidation, fake newspaper articles, and dirty tricks campaigns. Opponents were accused of being gay or Nazis, or were linked to murders, which the movement called "psywar techniques".

From the 1970s to the first decade of the 21st century, LaRouche founded several groups and companies. In addition to the National Caucus of Labor Committees, there was the Citizens Electoral Council (Australia), the National Democratic Policy Committee, the Fusion Energy Foundation, and the U.S. Labor Party. In 1984, he founded the Schiller Institute in Germany with his second wife, and three political parties there – the Europäische Arbeiterpartei, Patrioten für Deutschland, and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität – and in 2000 the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement. His printing services included Computron Technologies, Computype, World Composition Services, and PMR Printing Company, Inc, or PMR Associates.

1974: Contacts with far-right groups, intelligence gathering

LaRouche established contacts with Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby and elements of the Ku Klux Klan in 1974. Frank Donner and Randall Rothenberg wrote that he made successful overtures to the Liberty Lobby and George Wallace's American Independent Party, adding that the "racist" policies of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party endeared it to members of the Ku Klux Klan. George Michael, in Willis Carto and the American Far Right, says that LaRouche shared with the Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto an antipathy towards the Rockefeller family. The Liberty Lobby defended its alliance with LaRouche by saying the U.S. Labor Party had been able to "confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left".

Gregory Rose, a former chief of counter-intelligence for LaRouche who became an FBI informant in 1973, said that while the LaRouche movement had extensive links to the Liberty Lobby, there was also copious evidence of a connection to the Soviet Union. George and Wilcox say neither connection amounted to much – they assert that LaRouche was "definitely not a Soviet agent" and state that while the contact with the Liberty Lobby is often used to imply "'links' and 'ties' between LaRouche and the extreme right", it was in fact transient and marked by mutual suspicion. The Liberty Lobby soon pronounced itself disillusioned with LaRouche, citing his movement's adherence to "basic socialist positions" and his softness on "the major Zionist groups" as fundamental points of difference. According to George and Wilcox, American neo-Nazi leaders expressed misgivings over the number of Jews and members of other minority groups in his organization, and did not consider LaRouche an ally. George Johnson, in Architects of Fear, similarly states that LaRouche's overtures to far right groups were pragmatic rather than sincere. A 1975 party memo spoke of uniting with these groups only to overthrow the established order, adding that once that goal had been accomplished, "eliminating our right-wing opposition will be comparatively easy".

Howard Blum wrote in The New York Times that, from 1976 onward, party members sent reports to the FBI and local police regarding members of left-wing organizations. In 1977, he wrote, commercial reports on U.S. anti-apartheid groups were prepared by LaRouche members for the South African government, student dissidents were reported to the Shah of Iran's Savak secret police, and the anti-nuclear movement was investigated on behalf of power companies. Johnson says the intelligence network was made up of "obnoxious devotees commandeering WATS lines and tricking bureaucrats into giving them information". By the late 1970s, members were exchanging almost daily information with Roy Frankhouser, a government informant and infiltrator of both far right and far left groups who was involved with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The LaRouche organization believed Frankhouser to be a federal agent who had been assigned to infiltrate right-wing and left-wing groups, and that he had evidence that these groups were actually being manipulated or controlled by the FBI and other agencies. LaRouche and his associates considered Frankhouser to be a valuable intelligence contact, and took his links to extremist groups to be a cover for his intelligence work. Frankhouser played into these expectations, misrepresenting himself as a conduit for communications to LaRouche from "Mr. Ed", an alleged CIA contact who did not exist in reality.

1980s

From the third quarter of 1979, the LaRouche movement conducted most of its U.S. electoral activities as the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), a political action committee. The name drew complaints from the Democratic Party's Democratic National Committee. Democratic Party leaders refused to recognize LaRouche as a party member, or to seat the few delegates he received in his seven primary campaigns as a Democrat. In its 2019 obituary of LaRouche, New York magazine reported that LaRouche's attempts to pose as a Democrat were originally an attempt at a spoiler operation to divide the opponents of Ronald Reagan.

LaRouche's campaign platforms advocated a return to the Bretton Woods system, including a gold-based national and world monetary system; fixed exchange rates; and abolishing the International Monetary Fund. He supported the replacement of the central bank system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, with a "national bank"; a war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering; building a tunnel under the Bering Strait; the building of nuclear power plants; and a crash program to build particle-beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). He opposed the Soviet Union and supported a military buildup to prepare for imminent war; supported the screening and quarantine of AIDS patients; and opposed environmentalism, deregulation, outcome-based education, and abortion:

No more will the United States fight World Wars to save the British Empire in any shape or guise. No more will the United States tolerate the British system, whether colonial or neo-colonial. No more will the United States tolerate the economics of Adam Smith in any part of the world. We are going to take this aching, poor, hungry world and we're going to transform it with American methods. We're going to transform it through the export and development of high technology, we're going to have Manhattan Projects and NASA projects and every dirigiste, Federally-directed, scientific crazed program that we deem necessary.

In December 1980, LaRouche and his followers started what came to be known as the "October Surprise" allegation, namely that in October 1980 Ronald Reagan's campaign staff conspired with the Iranian government during the Iran hostage crisis to delay the release of 52 American hostages held in Iran, with the aim of helping Reagan win the 1980 United States presidential election against Jimmy Carter. The Iranians had agreed to this, according to the theory, in exchange for future weapons sales from the Reagan administration. The first publication of the story was in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review on December 2, 1980, followed by his New Solidarity on September 2, 1983, alleging that Henry Kissinger, one of LaRouche's regular targets, had met Iran's Ayatollah Beheshti in Paris, according to Iranian sources in Paris. The theory was later echoed by former Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr and former Naval intelligence officer and National Security Council member Gary Sick.

1990s

LaRouche began his sentence in 1989, serving it at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. From there he ran for Congress in 1990, seeking to represent the 10th District of Virginia, but he received less than one percent of the vote. He ran for president again in 1992 with James Bevel as his running mate, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations. It was only the second-ever campaign for president from prison. He received 26,334 votes, standing again as the "Economic Recovery" party. For a time he shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker. Bakker later wrote of his astonishment at LaRouche's detailed knowledge of the Bible. According to Bakker, LaRouche received a daily intelligence report by mail, and at times had information about news events days before they happened. Bakker also wrote that LaRouche believed their cell was bugged. In Bakker's view, "to say LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying that the Titanic had a little leak."

Viktor Kuzin, a member of the Moscow City Council and a founder of the Democratic Union in Russia, travelled to Minnesota in 1993 to meet LaRouche in prison, and afterwards participated in international campaigns to exonerate LaRouche. An advertisement calling for exoneration was published in several U.S. newspapers, signed by Kuzin, Civil Rights attorney J. L. Chestnut, former Ugandan president Godfrey Binaisa, and others. Chestnut was interviewed in the Tuscaloosa News saying that when he met LaRouche, "I told him that he might as well be black and in Alabama."

The exoneration campaigns garnered the support of a number of State Representatives and State Senators in the U.S., as well as a former justice of the Washington State Supreme Court.

LaRouche was released on parole in January 1994, and returned to Loudoun County. The Washington Post wrote that he would be supervised by parole and probation officers until January 2004. Also in 1994, his followers joined members of the Nation of Islam to blame the Anti-Defamation League for what they alleged were crimes and conspiracies against African Americans, reportedly one of several such meetings since 1992.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote a letter in 1995 to then-Attorney General Janet Reno in which he said that the case against LaRouche involved "a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge". He asserted that, "The government, ex parte, sought and received an order effectively closing the doors of these publishing businesses, all of which were involved in First Amendment activities, effectively preventing the further repayment of their debts." He called the convictions "a tragic miscarriage of justice which at this time can only be corrected by an objective review and courageous action by the Department of Justice". The LaRouche movement organized two panels to review the cases: the Curtis Clark Commission, and the Mann-Chestnut hearings.

2000s

LaRouche founded the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement (WLYM) in 2000, saying in 2004 that it had hundreds of members in the U.S. and a lesser number overseas. During the Democratic primaries in June 2000, he received 53,280 votes, or 22% of the total, in Arkansas. Despite finishing above the 15% threshold needed to obtain delegates, LaRouche was denied any delegates and was barred from attending the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

In 2002, LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review argued that the September 11 attacks in 2001 had been an "inside job" and "attempted coup d'etat", and that Iran was the first country to question it. The article received wide coverage in Iran, and was cited by senior Iranian government officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Hassan Rouhani. Mahmoud Alinejad wrote that, in a subsequent telephone interview with the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, LaRouche said the attacks had been organized by rogue elements inside the U.S., aiming to use the incident to promote a war against Islam, and that Israel was a dictatorial regime prepared to commit Nazi-style crimes against the Palestinians.

In 2003, LaRouche was living in a "heavily guarded" rented house in Round Hill, Loudoun County, Virginia.

LaRouche again entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, setting a record for the number of consecutive presidential campaigns; Democratic Party officials did not allow him to participate in candidate forum debates. He did not run in 2008.

As during the preceding decade, LaRouche and his followers denied that human civilization had harmed the environment through DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, or carbon dioxide. According to Chip Berlet, "Pro-LaRouche publications have been at the forefront of denying the reality of global warming".

Iqbal Qazwini wrote in the Arabic-language daily Asharq Al-Awsat in 2003 that LaRouche was one of the first to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 and German reunification. He said LaRouche had urged the West to pursue a policy of economic cooperation similar to the Marshall Plan for the advancement of the economy of the socialist countries. According to Qazwini, recent years have seen a proliferation of LaRouche's ideas in China and South Asia. Qazwini referred to him as the spiritual father of the revival of the new Silk Road or Eurasian Landbridge, which aims to link the continents through a network of ground transportation.

Ideology and beliefs

University of Notre Dame political philosophers Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert write of LaRouche that "[I]t must be nearly unique in American politics that a presidential candidate ... makes the interpretation of Plato a major issue in his campaign."

According to George Johnson, LaRouche saw history as a battle between Platonists, who believe in absolute truth, and Aristotelians, who rely on empirical data. Johnson characterizes LaRouche's views as follows: the Platonists include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche believed that many of the world's ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers (such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. Industry, technology, and classical music should be used to enlighten the world, LaRouche argued, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new Dark Age in which the world will be ruled by oligarchs. Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led him to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, and anti-abortion advocates.

In Architects of Fear (1983), Johnson compares LaRouche's view to an Illuminati conspiracy theory; Johnson writes that after he wrote about LaRouche in The Minneapolis Star, LaRouche's followers denounced him as part of a conspiracy of elitists that began in ancient Egypt. But according to LaRouche, Aristotelians are not necessarily in communication or coordination with one another: "From their standpoint, [they] are proceeding by instinct," LaRouche said. "If you're asking how their policy is developed – if there is an inside group sitting down and making plans – no, it doesn't work that way ... History doesn't function quite that consciously."

In 2011, Stephen E. Adkins's Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism In Modern American History called LaRouche "the leading neo-fascist politician in the United States".

Controversy

LaRouche was described as having "fascistic tendencies", taking positions on the far right (despite his self-identification with the left and some left-wing policies), and creating disinformation.

Designation as a conspiracy theorist

LaRouche was commonly regarded as a conspiracy theorist: for example, in his Fox News obituary. An article in the Southern Poverty Law Center website names him as "a fringe ideologue and conspiracy theorist whom Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates and an expert on the radical right calls "the man who brought us fascism wrapped in an American flag". An NPR obituary is titled Conspiracy Theorist And Frequent Presidential Candidate Lyndon LaRouche Dies At 96. The Washington Post obituary reports he was "often described as an extremist crank and fringe figure" and that he "built a worldwide following based on conspiracy theories, economic doom, anti-Semitism, homophobia and racism".

Allegations of antisemitism

Beginning in the mid-1970s, allegations began to appear saying that LaRouche had fascist and antisemitic tendencies.

In 1977, LaRouche married his second wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, a German. Her 1984 book, The Hitler Book, argues that "We need a movement that can finally free Germany from the control of the Versailles and Yalta treaties, thanks to which we have staggered from one catastrophe to another for an entire century." Helga founded the Schiller Institute, which has been described as promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories by the Berliner Zeitung and Political Research Associates, a nonprofit research group that studies right-wing, white supremacist, and militia groups.

LaRouche said he was anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. When the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) accused LaRouche of antisemitism in 1979, he filed a $26-million libel suit; the case failed when Justice Michael Dontzin of the New York Supreme Court ruled that it was fair comment and that the facts "reasonably give rise" to that description. LaRouche started a campaign against the ADL and set up a group called "The Provisional Committee to Clean Up B'nai Brith".

LaRouche said in 1986 that descriptions of him as a neo-fascist or anti-Semite stemmed from "the drug lobby or the Soviet operation – which is sometimes the same thing"; in 2006, he wrote that "religious and racial hatred, such as antisemitism, or hatred against Islam, or, hatred of Christians, is, on record of known history, the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today." Antony Lerman wrote in 1988 that LaRouche used "the British" as a code word for "Jews", a theory also propounded by Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989). George Johnson argued that King's presentation failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were Jewish. Daniel Pipes wrote in 1997 that LaRouche's references to the British really were to the British, though he agreed that an alleged British–Jewish alliance lay at the heart of LaRouche's conspiracism.

As of 2016, the Jewish Virtual Library states that "The international organization run by Lyndon LaRouche is a major source of such masked antisemitic theories globally. In the U.S. the LaRouchites spread these conspiracy theories in an alliance with aides to Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. A series of LaRouchite pamphlets calls the neoconservative movement the 'Children of Satan', which links Jewish neo-conservatives to the historic rhetoric of the blood libel."

Allegations of racism

Manning Marable of Columbia University wrote in 1998 that LaRouche tried in the mid-1980s to build bridges to the black community. Marable argued that most of the community was not fooled and quoted the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization for African American trade unionists, declaring that "LaRouche appeals to fear, hatred and ignorance. He seeks to exploit and exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of Americans by offering an array of scapegoats and enemies: Jews, Zionists, international bankers, blacks, labor unions – much the way Hitler did in Germany." During LaRouche's slander suit against NBC in 1984, Roy Innis, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, took the stand for LaRouche as a character witness, stating under oath that LaRouche's views on racism were "consistent with his own." Asked whether he had seen any indication of racism in LaRouche's associates, he replied that he had not.

Disputed record as economist and forecaster

LaRouche material frequently acclaims him as the world's greatest economist and the world's most successful forecaster. For example, his book title The Economics of the Noösphere: Why Lyndon LaRouche Is the World's Most Successful Economic Forecaster of the Past Four Decades. However, a website of disgruntled ex-movement leaders lists incorrect predictions of sudden world economic collapse, war or depression in 1956, 1961–1970, 1972, 1975–1992, and 1994–2011.

Apart from the numerous failed predictions are claimed some successful predictions or proposals: the eventual reunification of Germany, the Star Wars initiative, the New Silk Road (claimed as a precursor to the Chinese One Belt One Road initiative.)

Movement

Estimates of the size of LaRouche's movement have varied over the years; most say there is a core membership of 500 to 2,000. The estimated 600 members in 1978 paid monthly dues of $24. Johnson wrote in 1983 that both the Fusion Energy Foundation and the National Democratic Policy Committee had attracted some 20,000 members, as well as 300,000 magazine subscribers.

According to Christopher Toumey, LaRouche's charismatic authority within the movement was grounded on members' belief that he possessed a unique level of insight and expertise. He identified an emotionally charged issue, conducted in-depth research into it, and then proposed a simplistic solution, which usually involved restructuring of the economy or national security apparatus. He and the membership portrayed anyone opposing him as immoral and part of the conspiracy.

Description as a cult

The LaRouche movement has been described as a cult or cult-like by critics and anti-cult organizations.

A 1987 article by John Mintz in The Washington Post reported that members of the LaRouche movement lived hand-to-mouth in crowded apartments, with their basic needs paid for by the movement. They worked raising money or selling newspapers for LaRouche, doing research for him, or singing in a group choir, spending almost every waking hour together.

The group is known for its caustic attacks on opponents and former members. It has justified what it calls "psywar techniques" as necessary to shake people up; Johnson in 1983 quoted a LaRouche associate: "We're not very nice, so we're hated. Why be nice? It's a cruel world. We're in a war and the human race is up for grabs". Charles Tate, a former LaRouche associate, told The Washington Post in 1987 that members see themselves as exempt from the ordinary laws of society: "They feel that the continued existence of the human race is totally dependent on what they do in the organization, that nobody would be here without LaRouche. They feel justified in a peculiar way doing anything whatsoever."

Death

LaRouche's death was announced on the website of one of his organizations. He died on February 12, 2019, at age 96. Neither the place nor cause of his death was specified.